


Wartime Glory

by sunrise_town



Category: Original Work
Genre: Fantasy, Flash Fiction, Gen, Guns, Injury, Not Beta Read, Original work - Freeform, Race, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 03:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29003736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunrise_town/pseuds/sunrise_town
Summary: The sun sets low over the desert’s top, and the healer finds that burying the woman was better than doing nothing





	Wartime Glory

The sun lays low under the desert’s top.

“Morning is coming,” the woman mutters, grabs a rag, and dumps it into the water. She’s in a small shack, the type with no flooring, and across from her is an incredibly sick man. She can’t imagine he’ll make it, but she hasn’t got any other things to do. 

His arm is black, now. A hamster-snake, likely. It has to come off. 

“No,” he mutters when she tells him. “I’d rather die.” 

He’s a soldier. She doesn’t know how he got there. The war is no where near the Western Doni City, but it is in the eastern one, which means he must have somehow got stranded outside the city with no choice but to press forward. She has no idea how he survived. His uniform is destroyed, the poor man is half naked on the wrong side, and for all she knew, he could be a member of the opposition. 

Either way, he’s a person, and she’s got nothing better to do. He’ll probably be dead in an hour, anyway, since he doesn’t want his arm cut off. If it comes off, is what he’s probably thinking, there will be nothing to do with his life. All he knows is how to grab a gun and fight. 

Makes her think of her own daughter. Forced to war just to come back once with her finger on the trigger, ready to shoot. After that, she never saw the girl again. Things are better that way. 

The man dies, but not before she takes a look at his uniform and sees the blue patch. Things are also better that way. 

She’s been in that shack for a long time. 

There are other shacks, too. A man who gives out passports (most likely fake), a woman who makes clothes (the ones they wear), a woman and a man and someone she isn’t entirely sure of with one gun (it doesn’t work), and a man who sells camels, carts, and food (makes it, too, if you’re lucky). 

Most days, they wait. Some days, people come. The food man will give them a camel, maybe a cart if they have too many supplies or are very rich, and restock for them. A useless gun will be waived in their face. They almost never buy clothes, and they almost always need healing. Sometimes, much more regularly, the man who makes the tedious journey to their shacks will come back with all the carts and camels the food man rented out. 

One day, when the sun hasn’t graced the desert with its presence yet, there’s a woman. 

If the man had questionable allegiances, it’s clear as daylight who she is with. Her eyes are blue and her hair is black. She contrasts so deeply with the brown haired and skinned people of the shacks it’s almost comical. It’s rude to think, but her difference makes her ugly in the healers eyes. She can’t pair together that woman with a human. 

“Hey!” barks the gun man, taking his turn with the fake weapon. 

“That weapon is fake,” she announces as he does, taking out her own weapon and pointing it at him. 

The desert goes still, for a moment. 

The lady needs to be healed. Desperately. Her left leg is bleeding out; it’s a miracle she made it so far. 

“I’m going to shoot you if you don’t,” she tells the healer, placing the gun at her forehead. The healer still has nothing better to do, but she doesn’t want to heal this woman. 

“How do we know that gun isn’t empty?” The healer says. Even the inhuman in front of her wouldn’t have the guts to kill her. 

She shoots the sand three meters in front of them. No more questions are asked. 

The woman sits on the bed at the back of the shack meant for people who look a lot more like the healer and people who haven’t already destroyed every livelihood she ever had. Her hand is always on the trigger. 

Still, the healer will not heal her. She pretends to instead. 

“How will you sleep?” She asks, picking up on the numerous flaws in the woman’s plan. 

“You have all day to make sure I’m out of here before sunset,” the woman gruffly replies. 

The healer is going to take satisfaction in watching this woman die. 

“Here, take this cream,” the healer says after she spent an hour heating up mashed roots that do nothing. “Put it on.” 

The woman does. In the horizon, the sun is still missing. 

The soldier woman is in a lot of pain, by that point. She’s crying, actually, and it’s such an odd thing to see that all the healer can do is stare. 

“Move your fucking eyes!” The woman warns. 

“I’m not done healing you,” the healer reminds her and turns away. Now, she’s facing the doorway of her shack. “Sun’s rising,” she idly comments.

“How dare it.” 

The woman has been crying for far too long. 

She didn’t want to heal her, and she still won’t. Pain-stealers never healed anyone. 

“Drink this,” she commands the woman. 

“Is it poison?” 

There’s nothing in the healer’s items that could be used as poison. Nothing that would kill fast enough to make sure the woman didn’t have enough time to grab her gun and distribute her own poison first. 

The healer explains this and drinks some of it herself. The woman takes it too, and some time later has the audacity to smile in relief. 

“Where are you from?” The healer asks as the sun is well into the sky. 

The woman doesn’t answer. “Where are you?” 

“The Eastern Doni City. The one I presume you were just fighting at.”

There’s nothing to say to that, so the healer speaks again, “if it weren’t for you pale demons, I’d still be there.” 

For a second, the woman nods. Then she doesn’t and the moment that never was is lost. 

“Why do your people want to destroy?” The healer asks, thinking of her daughter and her son and her other son. 

She just wants closure. 

“Your people are...” the woman is looking for the word. It takes long. “Undisciplined,” she settles with. 

“How so?”

“If you could see how good it is where I came from, you would agree.” 

“So we deserve this bloodshed?” 

“Yes.” 

There’s nothing to say to that, also. 

“Are the streets made of gold?” The healer asks. She wants to know what good means. 

“No,” the woman admits, but she doesn’t sound ashamed of her country’s shortcoming. “Yours are.” 

“The sand ain’t gold.” 

“That’s not what I meant.” 

“Then what is?”

“You wouldn’t...” she cuts herself off. Not another word is said for an hour. 

“Do you got kids?” The healer asks as she reapplies the cream. It still doesn’t work; never will. 

“No, I’m eighteen.”

“And?” 

The woman doesn’t answer that and instead asks, “When did you have kids?”

“Fourteen.”

“This is why,” the woman mutters, and she looks disgusted, “this is why.” 

This time, the woman speaks, “What about your kids?” 

“I had a daughter, and two sons. My daughter was the eldest and when your people started this big ol’ war she was drafted by some rebel group. My other son died from illness and my youngest was never born.” 

The woman says nothing. There’s nothing to ever say. 

“Is your daughter alive?” 

“I don’t know. Saw her, once, back in the East. She- well she wasn’t what she always was. It was a good thing she went back.” 

“Went back?”

“Back to the rebel group that kidnapped her.” 

“I thought she was drafted?” 

“I was using a euphemism, you stupid woman.” 

“Why did she go back, then?” 

How could the healer explain this? The gun on her bedside, the threats, the social ostracism-

-the healer sighs and looks at the woman in front of her. It seems that she already understood a bit better than she thought she did.

“I brought food,” comes the food man, holding two wooden bowls of soup. 

“Is it poison?” The healer asks, and the food man laughs. 

They both end up eating it. 

“We are people too, you know,” the healer says as they finish up the bowls. By this point, the only way to save the woman from death is to cut the leg off. The healer feels a slight sense of deja vu as she thinks of it. 

The woman says nothing, again, and it’s a fair response. It wasn’t like the healer saw her as a person, either. 

The sun hasn’t set yet and the woman is asleep. 

“Time for you to die,” the healer says but the gun is a foreign object that she doesn’t want to touch right then. Instead, the man who was taking his turn with the fake gun comes in and makes a perfect shot to her head. 

In the distance, the sun sets low over the desert’s top, and the healer finds that burying the woman was better than doing nothing


End file.
